[dmortin]

You should post such a generated link here as an example, so people can immediately try it by clicking on it.

[Rumperuu]

Good point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#aHRtbCA%2BIGJvZ...

(I wasn't kidding about needing to shorten those links.)

[yorwba]

Shorter link that still works with your addon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela#cDpudGgtb2YtdHl...

I simply tried to find a suffix of the path that still identifies the element uniquely. Turns out that p:nth-of-type(3) is good enough already. If you want to be a bit more robust to changes on the page, you could also search for the last element with an ID in the path, i.e. #mw-content-text > div.mw-parser-output > p:nth-of-type(3).

[supermdguy]

Cypress (the testing framework) has a way to get a short, unique selector for any element on a page. It's even in its own npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@cypress/unique-selector

[dmortin]

It kind of defeats the point that you need the extension to view the generated links.

You may want to add an option to select only from the anchors/ids from the page to generate links which work in any browser.

Though there may already be an extension for this.

[Rumperuu]

If you mean what I think you mean, you can already send a link that specifies a valid element ID on the page to anybody and have their browser focus on it — that's what fragment identifiers are for. However, if the page designer has neglected to provide a unique ID for each page element (and they probably have), you're out of luck. Ideally, you'd be able to specify any valid CSS selector that only selects one element as a fragment identifier, but that's not the case (and is basically what this extension makes possible).

[idbehold]

Would an XPath work for this? Seems like that would be easiest considering Firefox already has built-in support for getting the XPath from an element on the page.